The present invention concerns a mushroom packing apparatus.
Although the apparatus of the present invention is primarily intended for use in the grading and packing of mushrooms, it will of course be understood from the following description that said apparatus would equally be suited for use with similar delicate items which conventionally require grading and packing.
It is a well established practice in the trade of mushroom growing to provide custom built growing houses in which the mushrooms may be grown in a carefully maintained environment. Each growing house conventionally contains rows of growing beds containing compost, on which the mushrooms are grown. The rows of growing beds are separated by passages running therebetween. Therefore, when harvesting the mushrooms, pickers travel along the passages between said rows, picking the mushrooms and depositing them in a basket or similar container for subsequent sorting and packing.
It is also known in the art to provide a custom built trolley having a conveyor on which the picked mushrooms are deposited, the trolley further including a number of containers into which the mushrooms are deposited from the conveyor. The conveyor is arranged to grade the mushrooms by size, such that each container includes only mushrooms within a given size range. Once one of the containers has been filled with mushrooms, the picker must cease picking, remove the container from the trolley, and deposit the container in a suitable location for further processing, for example, weighing to determine if the correct market weight of mushrooms has been loaded into the container. If said weight has not been achieved, or indeed if it has been surpassed, the contents of the container must be suitably adjusted.
Having removed the filled container from the trolley, the picker must then get an empty container and position it on the trolley in place of the filled container which has been removed. Once this has been effected, the picker may resume picking mushrooms from the bed. It will therefore be appreciated that the picker must also continually observe the containers in the trolley, while simultaneously trying to pick mushrooms, in order to ensure that none of the containers overflow.